maryhelena

Tracing miracle type, wonder, fantasy stories, is not what the search for the history of early christian origins is about - who knows when speculation sprung? All you will get is a jump from one imaginative idea to the next - that's the nature of such things. No logic necessary.

As for the Toldoth Yeshu - it's the dating, around 90 b.c., a date that sets its story in the time of Alexander Jannaeus, that is important - and that, Stephan, is what we have to deal with. 90 b.c. And if, as I maintain, the execution of Antigonus was relevant to the gospel writers and the creation of their crucified JC figure - then that date, 90 b.c., is relevant; it is a very likely time period for the birth of Antigonus. (Epiphanius linking this time period to the birth of the Christ figure...)

stephan huller

Really? The same text says that Judas 'defiled' - variously defined as 'urinated on,' 'sodomized' 'ejaculated upon' - Jesus while both men were flying through the air. I have to accept a dating of 100 BCE when the stories are so ludicrous? Jesus's father is named as 'Pandera' in the rabbinic tradition a clear corruption of the original 'Panthera' the Roman soldier known to Celsus and his lost Jewish source. How can Panthera the Roman soldier have fathered Jesus in 100 BCE?

Not to mention the difficulty that the gospels, all the earliest Christian and pagan sources identify Jesus as living in the first century CE. No, we don't have to take the rabbinic tradition seriously. An error has occurred and the most likely explanation is that they mistook which Jannai was associated with Jesus. The rabbinic tradition never says that Jesus lived in 100 BCE. They just associate him with 'Jannai.'

mountainman

Toledot Yeshu

stephan huller

The Toledoth Yeshu and Celsus identify Jesus's father as Pandera. When you asked the last time I dated the text to the medieval era but it certain knows of the same tradition as Celsus. I always feel I am on the Electric Company with you Pete - the word of the day is 'parody.' What is your point? The Jews made fun of Christians - 'THEREFORE' Christianity was a parody.

I make fun of you. Doesn't mean I am Pete the mountainman.

maryhelena

And the gospel story, dated to the time of Herod the Great and Pilate, has JC born of a virgin, walking on water, raising the death, and himself being raised from the dead and walking through closed doors, eating broiled fish ...great story........So, now it's down to which fanciful story is more appealing - or is it just that date of 90 b.c. that bothers you? It's not just the Toldoth Yeshu - Epiphanius dates Christ to the time of Alexander Jannaeus. Other writers mention christians in the time of Augustus. And even the 'Paul' story places 'Paul's' escape from Damascus under Aretas III, at the latest 63/62 b.c. (shades of Angigonus in that story - Antigonus being taken prisoner to Rome in that year, by Pompey - and escaping from Rome a few years later......)

The history of the JC story does not revolve around Marcus Julius Agrippa II - this historical figure might well have played a role in the developing christian story - but that's it - a role. There are other historical figures with historical roots going back long before Marcus Julius Agrippa II appeared on the scene. You are working from the assumption of a historical gospel JC - and that assumption is clouding the historical research into early Christian history.

Stephan, don't put all your eggs in one basket.....

mountainman

I agree up to this point.

Are you crazy? That's never been my point, and is not my point at all. Besides the WIKI page on this text shows "parody" cited by scholars and academics in specific relation to this text. I am just picking up on what has already been written.

My claim is that the Jews (and pagans) parodied (made fun of) the Christians by inventing their own stories about the Life and Times of Jesus. Dont you understand this simple claim? These authors parodied (made fun of) the Christians' Story Books by inventing their own stories about the Life and Times of Jesus. It's a standard political ploy.

Christianity (specific the story books of the canon) was the subject of parody. The texts such as this one are deliberate send ups, mockeries, twisted versions of the "Official Canonical Stories" created perhaps for seditious amusement value for the non christians for heaven's sake.

Some of the parody looks to be deliberately offensive, as exemplified by questions scholars have illicited from the text such as was Jesus conceived as a result of rape. I see in stuff like this what looks to me like a deliberate satirization of the canonical books of the NT. Mary was raped by a Roman soldier to produce the leader of the Christian church. This fits the 4th century.


Whoever the author of the Toledoth Yeshu was, he may have drawn upon Celsus direct (after c.175 CE), or Celsus via Eusebius (after c.324 CE). Whether early or late we can be reasonably sure he had no love or respect for the new testament, or for Jesus, or for the Christians or the church. Jesus was not conceived by the Holy Ghost but by an act of rape by a Roman soldier. The Toledoth Yeshu appears to be an authorial invention/product of a heretic.



English translation text of Toledoth Yeshu

The phrase "the letters of the Ineffible name" appears a few times in this text.
I wonder if this is a reference to the "nomina sacra" in the New Testament

Toto

More precisely, it was the product of a Jew, not a heretical Christian.

maryhelena

Yes, an important point to keep in mind......

mountainman

Only if the oldest manuscript is Aramaic or Hebrew etc which at the moment appears to be the case from the WIKI page. However the dates mentioned there are late 4th and 5th centuries or later, and the oldest manuscripts themselves are a thousand years later. Has anyone ever conjectured there may have been a Greek original?

When does "Yeshu" appear?

Or rather in which century does which "Yeshu" first appear?

Yeshu

It seems reasonably obvious to me also, that many Jews with no interest at all in history were forced to confront a historical/biographical question that bedeviled historians at that epoch when the new testament (a) in ??? CE first appeared in circulation amidst the Greeks, and (b) in 325 CE when it was widely published in the 4th century as the central claim to an historical jesus by the monotheistic state Roman universal church and perhaps (c) when it was Canonized c.367 CE.

It should not take too much historical consideration to perceive that the same confronting question was in the face of the Hellenes, Platonists, Arians, Stoics, Pythagoreans, Manichaeans, Physicians, Mathematicans, Philosophers, Poets and all the other vile heretics who preserved their own codices.

Toto

No. What would be the point?